E. Peevie tells stories about life, love, loss and other topics that don't begin with L.

Saturday, September 1, 2007

Vagina Dialogues IV: Catch-phrases

I’ve already mentioned one nominee for catch-phrase of the weekend:

“That moth is a metaphor for your farts. Get it OUT of here!”

As the conversation and beverages flowed, other potential catch-phrases for our Girl-Power Weekend in the Woods came up. Dr. Vespinator scribbled them on a handy travel magazine so that they would not be lost to future generations.*

So there we were, sitting around on the screened in back porch that Arid Queen was using as a bedroom. We listened to the loud conversation and raucous laughs coming from partiers around a firepit at a nearby cabin, and we thought about crashing their fiesta.

But we had our own festival of intimacy and hilarity going on. We listened to the saga of the long-lost-now-found adopted daughter; we rode the Tilt-A-Whirl of emotions with our friend as she relived the fear, doubt, hope, anxiety, guilt, joy, and tenderness she’d been experiencing over the past three years in the process of rediscovering her child, and part of herself.

We recounted work tales, relationship woes, and parenting frustrations. In the space and freedom of a weekend we found ourselves able to listen more deeply and share more honestly than we normally can do in the time-cramped quarters of our usual gatherings.

So I felt relaxed enough to spread out comfortably in an Adirondack-style chair, one leg stretched out in front of me and the other hooked over the arm of the chair. But this relaxed—but fully clothed, mind you—posture provoked a less-than-relaxed commentary.

“Do you have to sit like that? I’m staring right at your vagina!” said Bob the Builder. And Dr. Vespinator chimed in, “Yeah, it’s not very lady-like!”

Do I really have to worry about being lady-like when I’m sitting on a log-cabin porch in the dark with a bunch of chicks?

So J. Cool took it upon herself to demonstrate the ridiculousness of the tattling tittsters. She threw her legs up in the air in a giant V—and this is a woman with serious back issues, mind you—and yelled, “You got a problem?”

A minute or two later, after order was restored and we had returned to the non-genital topic at hand, someone directed a question to Rock Star.

“I don’t know,” she said, “All I can think about is J. Cool’s vagina!”

Now that’s what I call a catchphrase.

*Remember the scribbled catch-phrases not to be lost to future generations? Well, I’m sorry to say that they were entrusted to me, and hence, lost to future generations. Let that be a lesson to all of you.